Yes windows the OS is inferior to Linux the OS, but Windows the platform is superior to Linux the platform in the general case.

Its sort of like Rome was a great civilization but it wasn't Caligula or Nero or Tiberius that made it that way. It was the society that could protect the artists and engineers from having to be farmers and soldiers so that they could advance the culture. MS provides a platform under which the developers don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they write a program. These days, linux does that too, but MS already has all the power. Oh well, so did Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero.

MS works as a collective of partnerships surrounding the Mother System. The partners (software companies, for example) must answer to MS. This helps in a way, but making it work is not trivial. Once you click somebody's icon to do something (or invoke it indirectly) the ball goes into their court. Help might be in Kuala Lumpur.

the biggie: Windows is 100% proprietary and only real sharpers within the customer base are going to figure out how it works under the hood. MS presumes for everybody what and how they are supposed to do stuff. But I stick with it, because I am lazy. So if I can't figure out quickly how to do something, I don't do it. I suspect Linux has it all over Windows in this respect (meaning, telling the internals of the system).